A Spitalfields church with a Tuscan portico under a broach spire pierced by a Venetian window, built for a parish of Huguenot silk weavers (1714–1729)
Spitalfields, London
Christ Church, Spitalfields — the most admired of his six churches.
Architecture · Classical & Renaissance
Nicholas Hawksmoor
c. 1661–1736 · English
English Baroque
Hawksmoor began as Wren's clerk at the age of about eighteen and became the strangest and most original of English Baroque architects. He worked as Vanbrugh's partner at Castle Howard and Blenheim, then built six London churches under the 1711 Act for Fifty New Churches: massive, primitive, deliberately un-Roman buildings of white Portland stone whose steeples borrow from Egypt, Gothic and the ancient tombs of Asia Minor. Neglected for two centuries, he is now the cult figure of English architecture.
How to spot them
- ▸Huge blank walls of Portland stone, keystones the size of coffins, and steeples that look like pagan tombs
- ▸Six London churches built under the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711
- ▸Wren's clerk, then Vanbrugh's partner — always the draughtsman behind other men's names
- ▸Peter Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor and the modern occult mythology of his church sites
Key buildings
A City church squeezed onto a tiny site, its north wall a blind arcade of rusticated stone and its tower crowned by twin turrets (1716–1727)
City of London
St Mary Woolnoth; it stands over Bank station, and Eliot's Waste Land hears it keep the hours 'with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine'.
A church whose stepped pyramid steeple copies the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and is topped by a statue of George I in a toga (1716–1731)
Bloomsbury, London
St George's, Bloomsbury; lions and unicorns fight round the base of the spire.
An East End church with a great golden ball on its tower, granted the right to fly the white ensign, and a pyramid standing unexplained in its churchyard (1714–1730)
Limehouse, London
St Anne's Limehouse, which carries the highest church clock in London.
Twin Gothic towers finished on the west front of a coronation church some four centuries after the rest of it (1722–1745)
Westminster, London
The west towers of Westminster Abbey, completed after his death by John James.
Gothic-looking twin towers added to an Oxford college whose fellows are all graduates, around a screened north quadrangle (1716–1735)
Oxford, England
The north quadrangle and twin towers of All Souls; he also designed the Clarendon Building and the Radcliffe Camera's first scheme.
A Greenwich church rebuilt after its roof fell in, on the spot where a Danish army is said to have pelted an archbishop to death with ox bones (1712–1718)
Greenwich, London
St Alfege Church — the first of the Fifty New Churches to be built; Thomas Tallis is buried there and General Wolfe lies in the crypt.
Key ideas
- Antiquity means more than Rome: Egyptian pyramids, Greek tombs and early Christian basilicas are all legitimate sources
- Mass and shadow do the work that ornament does in other architects — the 'primitive' sublime
- A parish church should look like a temple and stand clear of its surroundings, with a tower as a landmark
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Nottinghamshire around 1661; he became Wren's domestic clerk in about 1679 and worked with him for nearly half a century
- •He was Clerk of Works at Greenwich, Kensington and Whitehall, and Surveyor to Westminster Abbey from 1723
- •He built six churches under the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, set up by Act of Parliament in 1711; only twelve of the fifty were built
- •He collaborated with Vanbrugh at Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, and finished Blenheim after Vanbrugh's quarrel with the Duchess of Marlborough
- •At Castle Howard he designed the Mausoleum, the pyramid and the curtain wall with its eleven bastions
- •He designed a scheme for the Radcliffe Camera at Oxford; the building was executed by James Gibbs
- •Much of his work was demolished or derided in the nineteenth century; the Hawksmoor revival dates from the 1920s and from Kerry Downes's scholarship
- •Peter Ackroyd's 1985 novel Hawksmoor, and Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat, built an occult legend around the siting of his churches
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey including Saint Margaret's Church
- Kerry Downes — Hawksmoor